HTML or WordPress?

One thing that comes up from time to time is why people selling resale rights products and PLR still include HTML sites with their products. Isn’t everything WordPress now?

WordPress is indeed a very powerful content management system. You can do some amazing things with it, but there is a price. And because of that, HTML pages do have a place.

At the risk of showing my age, I was there as the Internet was starting to become a “thing.” I remember my first website hosted on Geocities. Even before Javascript and WYSIWYG html editors. And it was painful.

So when I first saw WordPress, I knew just how powerful it was. Just being able to build an awesome menu without Javascript, frames, and imagemaps made everything else worth it. But there is more to WordPress than easy to build sites with menus.

There are so many different capabilities WordPress gives you. Because it is open source, it is very customizable. That customization comes in the form of themes and plugins. You can find plugins for everything. Membership sites? Yep. Popups? You bet. Countdown timers, rotating banners, two step optin forms? Check, check, and check. Ecommerce sites? Oh, let me count the ways.

In fact, a friend asked how I would build a site that sold a product but also offered rentals of the same item. I didn’t know, but with just ten minutes of research, I had three different options.

So its very powerful, but that power has a cost.

WordPress is actually two components. The actual site files and the database. The site files tell your browser how to display the content, and the database stores the content. The database takes extra software to run on the server, and this will slow down your server. How much varies from server to server as well as how big your site is. The bigger the site, the slower the performance.

The files that run on your site are not like HTML files. They are special files that dynamically build HTML files as a user makes a request. The files receive a request for content from the user, reads the data from the database, and then builds HTML files based on the settings – also read from the database – and sends the resulting files to the user’s web browser.

The more functions you add to your WordPress site, the slower it becomes.

Now, hardware is constantly getting cheaper, so the web servers of today are far more powerful at 1/4 the price of the servers ten years ago. So you can always throw money at the problem by paying extra for more powerful hardware to run your website.

But sometimes, you don’t have to.

A simple three page website that doesn’t get edited can easily be setup in HTML and run on just about any server out there. HTML uses very few resources. In fact, the server doesn’t do anything with the files except download them to the user.

If you are going to be running a multiple three-page sites like this, using WordPress for each site will require much more powerful hardware to run. Running each of them as just HTML will be cheaper in the long run.

There are also ways you can mix and match. You can combine HTML pages with a WordPress blog but this is more advanced and you can easily mess things up if you aren’t careful. But sometimes there are reasons to do this. (Cascading stylesheets, I’m looking at you.)

Ninety-nine times out of 100, I am going to say build a WordPress site. There are so many advantages to having WordPress and the cost off hardware makes it easy to run even a large, complex site without spending a huge amount of money.